Hosted Desktop: A Tougher Sell?

Ok so it’s off to VMworld next week for full immersion. It’s going to be an extremely busy show. If you haven’t tried out VMworld’s nifty Schedule Builder give it a try, it’s a great tool. (Just don’t make the mistake that I did and print out all of the sessions. Trust me, there are a lot and on just about every imaginable angle.)

Speaking of full immersion, I’ve been doing a lot of digging on the subject of hosted desktop virtualization lately and trying to scope out just where that market is headed. I’ll be having a lot of discussions about it next week so if any of you have any burning questions about this market, feel free to email them. I’ll do my best to get answers and post them here from the show.

Unlike server virtualization, this market has a lot of unknowns and imponderables. Jeff Jennings who heads up VDI products at VMware conceded that it's not going to be quite as straightforward a market sell as server virtualization since both ROI and deployment issues are more complex.

This is reinforced by a recent Yankee Group survey indicating that “just over one-third or 34% of the survey respondents indicated that they plan to virtualize their desktop PCs and laptops; and only 32% of the 34% said they have already deployed or are currently in the process of virtualizing their desktops.”

An upcoming feature in our Sept/Oct issue will do a deep dive on all the complicated issues associated with this interesting emerging market. By the way, if you're going to be at VMworld, please stop by the 1105 Media booth. It's always great to have a chance to talk to our readers.

Posted by Tom Valovic on 09/12/2008 at 12:49 PM